In Troubadour-Land: A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc Part 15

Then I heard such a service as did the heart good to hear. It was only vespers--just five psalms, a hymn, and the Magnificat; nothing more.

But the psalms were sung in alternate verses between the choir and the congregation, who knew every word and every note, and sang l.u.s.tily from their hearts' depths, the plain old Gregorian tones with which many of us are so familiar at home. I found the words welling up in my mind: "The voice of a great mult.i.tude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord G.o.d Omnipotent reigneth." I was glad there was no one with me as we dispersed, to speak to me. I could not have answered, my heart was too full. But I went back to the Maison Carree, and looked again at it for long, and then realised, in a way I had never realised before, how that the Carpenter of Nazareth had transformed the whole idea of worship into something of which the world previously had no conception.

To the ordinary English traveller the services in a foreign Roman Catholic church are so unintelligible that I may be excused if I say a word on vespers that may enable him to understand it. Usually--always on week days--two evening services, vespers and compline are said together, or rather one immediately after the other. Each consists of confession and absolution, a short Scriptural lesson, psalms, a canticle, a hymn and collects. The canticle for vespers is the Magnificat; for compline is the Nunc Dimittis.

Now as the two services were practically united, what our Reformers did was to weld them together. They cut out the second confession and absolution and the second batch of psalms, but retained the second lesson and the second canticle. The English even-song is therefore simply the Latin vespers and compline pressed into a single service. The Reformers, by putting a psalm as alternative for each canticle, perhaps intended the English even-song to serve as either vespers (when Magnificat was sung) or as compline (when Nunc Dimittis was sung).

When I was in Rome during the winter, I was very much astonished, one day, as the King of Italy pa.s.sed, to see a whole school of little boys under the direction of three Christian Brothers, strut by with their little noses in the air, and without raising their hats. At the same pension with myself was a young Swiss Benedictine monk, who sat by me at _table d'hote_, and with whom I struck up a warm friendship. I commented to him on what I had seen. "Oh!" he replied, "we make a point of never saluting the king. Why,"

he continued, "only yesterday I was walking down the Corso with Cardinal U----, when we saw the queen's carriage approaching. I asked what was to be done. His eminence replied, 'Keep your hat on, don't notice her.'"

I confess that my English blood boiled up, and for the first and last time I spoke sharply to my friend. I believe I made a certain allusion to an injunction of S. Paul, and told him plainly that I thought such conduct unbecoming in a gentleman and a Christian, and a priest.

On entering France ones sees what devastation the Revolution wrought on the Church, and one compares the condition there with the very light and easy way in which she has been taken out of her temporal throne and seated on the ground in Italy. She has been treated there too easily, so easily that she pouts, and frets, and sulks; whereas in France she has been an Antaeus who rose from the ground stronger than when cast down. In Rome, the Church shuffles along in her old slouching, hands-in-the-pockets, half-asleep, don't-care style, letting every opportunity slip away, neglected by the people, because she neglects them. In France, the Church is tingling with fresh life-blood to her fingers' ends, full of energy, activity, zeal. Why, there is not to be found in Rome, or Florence, or Naples, a church where a tolerable service is to be heard sung. In Rome one gets sick of and angry with the squalling of eunuchs, and longs for a scourge of small cords to drive them out of the temple. No one cares for the Church services in Rome.

No attempt is made to attract the people to them. At Florence the service is like the bleating of a flock of sheep driven into a pen to be shorn, and the old canons who baa are enclosed within gla.s.s against draughts, and to the exclusion of all congregational worship. But in France, the people who have any religion in them love their services--love them and have made them their own, sing in them and follow them with eager interest. I remember, when I was a youth in France, that few men were seen in church, and the ladies lounged through the service. It is not so now, you see as many men in church as you will in England, and the women are attentive and devout.

The Italian Church must suffer deeper humiliation, and learn to touch her cap to "the powers that be, ordained of G.o.d," before the people will rally to her and show her reverence.

On the summit of the hill above the fountain and temple of the Nymphs is a most puzzling building, the _Tourmagne_. It is of Roman construction, a great tower like that of Babel, in stages, the upper stage with semicircular recesses that sustained the external wall, now in part fallen.

No one can tell its purpose. It has clearly been utilised since its first construction by the Romans, by making it an angle tower of some other building, the foundations of which have been quite recently exposed. The tower is octagonal. It resembles the structure of the lighthouse at Ostia, already mentioned as in the Torlonia gallery. But why a lighthouse here? It is true that to the south of Nimes was lagoon and marsh, with islets and strips of dry land scattered about among the tracts of water, all the way to the sea, but one hardly supposes such a lighthouse would have been raised to guide the _utriculares_ on their skin-sustained rafts. Yet for what other purpose it can have been raised it is hard to imagine. It stands on very high ground, and commands a most extensive prospect. It has long been, and is likely to remain, a hard nut for antiquaries to break their teeth upon.

The cathedral of Nimes has been, not so much restored as transformed internally, so as to void it of much interest, but it must have been a curious church at one time. Externally, at the west end, is a most wonderful frieze, a band of rich sculpture representing the story of man from the Creation to the drunkenness of Noah. In one chapel within is an old Christian sarcophagus utilised as an altar, on it our Lord is represented as teacher surrounded by the apostles. S. Paul is a modern church good in proportion, with an admirable central octagonal tower and spire. The only fault to be found with the church is in the details. S.

Baudille is a pretentious Gothic church, with two asparagus shoots as western towers, it has a square east end, with a really marvellously ugly east window. The new church of S. Perpetue is beneath criticism.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cathedral of Nimes.--Part of west front.]

There are two Roman triumphal arches at Nimes, but neither is remarkable.

In front of one I found a man exhibiting a cage of canaries. He had a little table before the cage on which small cards, each numbered, were set out. Then he sold among the bystanders tickets with corresponding numbers.

There were eighteen numbers, and each card sold for a sou, and the whole const.i.tuted a lottery for a chain and some seals that the fellow dangled before the eyes of the little circle of lookers-on. The lots were taken up after a little persuasion and chaffering. Then he opened the cage door; out hopped a canary that trotted up and down the little table, and finally picked up one of the cards. "Number nine," called the proprietor of the canaries. "Which monsieur is the happy possessor of card number nine?"

A soldier stepped forward, presented his tally, and received the silver watch-chain. Then all those who had been unsuccessful restored their cards, and the same process was repeated, this time among women, for a silver thimble.

Nimes struck me as one of the very brightest, pleasantest towns I have ever visited, and the one in which, if forced to live out of England, I think I could live most happily in. I have said not one word about the museum at Nimes, which is within the Maison Carree, and yet the museum contains some objects deserving of attention. There are two altars with wheels carved on them, both small, the largest only two feet three inches high, and that has on it not the wheel only, but the thunderbolt. These are altars to the Gaulish G.o.d of the sun. The second bears an inscription "et terrae matri."

It was dedicated doubtless to the "sun and to the earth mother," but the first portion of the legend is lost. In the Avignon Museum is a statue of a Gaulish Jupiter in military costume, with his right hand on the wheel, and with the eagle on his left. [1]

[Footnote 1: Others at Treves, Moulin, and Paris.]

Moreover, in the Nimes museum are some bronze circular ornaments, found in 1883 in the caves of S. Vallon in Ardeche, representing the wheel. On the triumphal arch of Orange are Gaulish warriors with horned helmets, and wheels as crests between the horns. The wheel, as symbol of the sun, was very general everywhere, in the east as well as the west, among the Germans as well as among the Gauls, but among the latter it a.s.sumed a very special importance, and it is due to this fact that in the French cathedrals the west window is a wheel window. At Basle there is a round window in the minster with figures climbing and falling on the spokes, and Fortune sits in the midst. It is a wheel of Fortune. It is the same at Beauvais, at Amiens, and elsewhere. At Chartres is a representation in stained gla.s.s of the Transfiguration; and Christ is exhibited in glory in the midst of an eight-spoked wheel. A curious statue at Luxeuil, now lost, represented a rider protecting a lady whilst his horse tramples on a prostrate foe; his raised hand over the woman is thrust through a six-rayed wheel. On the Meuse a similar peculiarity has been noticed in a fragment of a sculptured figure, it is a hand holding a four-spoked wheel. In the Museum Kircherianum at Rome are bronze six-rayed wheels, the spokes zigzagged like lightnings, found at Forli, others at Modena. All these were symbols of the sun. Now when Constantine professed to have seen his vision, which was in all probability a mock-sun, he thought that the rays he saw formed the Greek initials of Christ, and he therefore ordered these initials, _forming a six-rayed wheel_, to be set up on the standards of his soldiers. The only difference between his "Labarum" and the symbol of the Gaulish sun-G.o.d was that his upper spoke was looped to form the letter P. No doubt whatever, that his Keltic soldiers hailed the new standard as that of their national G.o.d, and that when they marched against Maxentius and met him at Saxa Rubra, eight miles from Rome, they thought that they, as Gauls, were marching to a second capture of the capital of the world, under the protection of their national G.o.d.

Among men of note that have been a.s.sociated with Nimes is Flechier, born at Pernes in Vaucluse in 1632, who became Bishop of Nimes in 1687. He was the son of a tallow-chandler. From his eloquence he was much regarded as a preacher, but unfortunately his discourses contain very little except well-rounded sentences of well-chosen words. He was a favourite of Louis XIV., who respected his integrity and piety. One day a haughty aristocratic prelate about the Court had the bad taste to sneer at him for his origin.

"Avec votre maniere de penser," replied Flechier calmly, "je crois que si vous etiez ne ce que je suis, vous n'eussiez fait, toute votre vie--que de chandelles."

CHAPTER XVI.

AIGUES MORTES AND MAGUELONNE.

A dead town--The Rhones-morts--Bars--S. Louis and the Crusades--How S.

Louis acquired Aigues Mortes--His ca.n.a.l--The four littoral chains and lagoons--The fortifications--Unique for their date--Original use of battlements--Deserted state of the town--Maguelonne--How reached--History of Maguelonne--Cathedral--The Bishops forge Saracen coins--Second destruction of the place--Inscription on door--Bernard de Treviis--His Romance of Pierre de Provence--Provencal poetry not always immoral--Present state of Maguelonne.

Aigues Mortes is a dead town, and differs from Maguelonne, to be presently described, in this, that it is a dead _town_, whereas Maguelonne is only the ghost of a dead town. It is a great curiosity, for it is a dead mediaeval town surrounded by its walls, and dominated by its keep. But first about its name, which signifies Dead Waters. If the reader will remember what has been already said about the structure of the delta of the Rhone, he will recall the fact that the river is constantly engaged in changing its mouths. When it has formed for itself a new mouth, it deserts its former course, which it leaves as a stagnating ca.n.a.l. This occasions the delta to be striped with what are locally termed Rhones-morts, whereas a flowing branch is called a Rhone-vif.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aigues Mortes.--One of the gates.]

Moreover the stagnant ma.s.ses of water left by floods are called Aigues Mortes--Dead Waters; and it is precisely on such that the little fortified town I am now writing about, stands. I know of no point on the littoral of the Rhone that offers so excellent an opportunity of observing the processes of that river than at Aigues Mortes. The river has, indeed, long ago deserted the branch that once discharged itself here, and it has left four lines behind it, making successive stages of advance, four bars, with their several backwaters, now converted into ponds or meres. The Ca.n.a.l of Beaucaire now pa.s.ses by Aigues Mortes, and reaches the Mediterranean nearly three miles below the town.

It was from Aigues Mortes that S. Louis sailed on his Crusades in 1248 and 1270; and it has a little puzzled many people to account for his having chosen such a wretched place as this for the a.s.sembly of his Crusaders and for embarkation. But he could not help himself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aigues Mortes.--Tower of the Bourgignons.]

As soon as Louis had, in 1244, made his vow to a.s.sume the cross, his first care was to obtain on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean a territory and a port sufficient for the concentration of the troops that were to from his expedition. But he encountered great difficulty. The king was not _suzerain_ over the southern provinces of France, and possessed as his own not a single town on the coast. The port of Narbonne was choked with sand, and belonged to the viscounts of that town. The port of Maguelonne was under the sovereignty of the bishop. The lagoons and their openings into the sea of Montpellier were under the King of Aragon. The ports of Agde and S. Gilles were subject to the counts of Toulouse, and independent Provence was not to be attached to the crown till three centuries later. The marshy district of Aigues Mortes was alone available; it was under the abbey of Psalmodi, planted amidst the swamps on a little sandy elevation. Louis IX.

entered into negotiations with the abbot, and in exchange for certain royal domains near Sommiere, he was enabled to acquire the town of Aigues Mortes and all the zone of lagoons between it and the sea.

At that time there existed but a single fortification--the tower of Matafera--erected about five centuries before as a place of refuge from the Saracens. S. Louis restored this tower, or rather rebuilt it, in the form in which it remains to this day. Then he constructed a quay, and scooped out a ca.n.a.l through the lagoons to the sea. This is the old ca.n.a.l, now full of sand, and up this vessels were able to proceed through two lagoons to the tower of Matafera, which acquired later the name of Tour de Constance.

But the old ca.n.a.l had an ephemeral existence; every inundation of the lagoons of the Rhone altered their depths, and disturbed the ca.n.a.l. A century or two later another ca.n.a.l was cut between the old one and that now in use, that also was destined in time to be choked up; but the old discharging and lading place of the vessels can still be distinguished by the heaps of ballast thrown out, consisting of stones from Genoa and Corsica. It is quite a mistake to suppose that Aigues Mortes was on the sea in the thirteenth century. The Crusaders embarked in the ca.n.a.l cut by S. Louis, and sailed through the lagoons before they reached the open Mediterranean.

The most ancient maps show us Aigues Mortes bathed by one of those branches of the Rhone, now deserted, which go by the name of Rhones-morts. At a time before history--at all events the history of Gaul begins, the Rhone had its princ.i.p.al mouth in the great Etang de Maugio; but it choked up its mouth there, and advanced eastward in several stages, leaving in its rear, as the river thus shifted its quarters, a series of dwindling and then dead channels.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch map of Mortes and its littoral chains.]

What is now the Pet.i.t Rhone, reaching the sea at Les Saintes Maries, was then the main stream, which has long ago turned away, and now discharges its greatest body of water into the Mediterranean at Saint Louis. It has left behind it, not only the dead or stagnant Rhones, its neglected beds, but also, as already noticed, its old bars, and these are very distinctly marked at Aigues Mortes. The first chain gives us the primitive beach, which began at the lagoon of Maugio, traversed the entire Camargue, and can be traced to Fos. It is formed of an almost uninterrupted succession of sandhills crowned with a tolerably rich vegetation; on it grow the white poplar, the aleppo and the umbrella pines. To the south of this lay the prehistoric sea; the ground is horizontal, and although subjected to culture shows sufficient evidence that it was at one time sea-bed, covered with more recent alluvium. Here is the great lagoon of Loyran, which, before many years are pa.s.sed, will be completely drained, and its bed turned up by the plough.

Still advancing seaward, we reach a second littoral chain, not so distinctly marked as the first, but nevertheless distinguishable by its low line of sandy dunes, on which a scanty growth of tamarisks and coa.r.s.e gra.s.s is sustained. Then we come to a succession of lagoons, once united into one, and after them the third bar, presenting exactly the same features--a low range of sand and pebbles, and beyond it once more lagoons, cut off from the waves of the Mediterranean by a fourth and last chain, the most recent, that belongs to the historic epoch.

But that is not all: the wash of the sea, its current settling west, and carrying with it the mud of the Rhone is gradually, but surely building up a fifth bar or bank, which will in time close the gulf from the point of Espignette to the bathing-place of Palavas, when the Gulf of Aigues Mortes will be converted into a second Etang de Berre.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of THE COAST OF PROVENCE & LANGUENDOC showing Old Lagoons & Deserted River Mouths]

Aigues Mortes is surrounded by its mediaeval fortifications just as they were left by Philip the Bold, son of S. Louis. The plan of the town is almost quadrilateral, it has six gates and fifteen towers. Only one angle of the parallelogram is cut off, where stands the stately circular tower of Constance. The streets are laid out in the most precise manner, cutting each other at right angles; there are four churches, of which the princ.i.p.al is Notre Dame des Sablons. The others were all formerly attached to monasteries or convents.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Original use of battlements.--(_From Viollet-le-Duc._)]

The plan of the fortification is precisely that adopted by the Crusaders wherever they built defences, in Syria, in Cyprus, in Palestine. The walls are crenellated, usually without machicolations, pierced with long slots, and with square holes through which beams were thrust, supporting wooden balconies which commanded the bases of the walls, and enabled the besieged to protect themselves against the efforts made by the a.s.sailants to sap the bases of the ramparts, or to escalade the walls. Towers, round and square at intervals, strengthened the walls, and formed points of vantage and of a.s.sembly for the besieged. Precisely similar fortifications were raised about the same period at Tortosa, Antioch, Ascalon, Caesarea, &c.; but all these have been destroyed, only Aigues Mortes remains, an unique and perfect example of the systematic fortification adopted by the Crusaders everywhere.

The reader, probably, has not given a thought to the original purpose of a battlement, so common on towers and churches and castles. I therefore venture to show what it was originally. It was a wall broken through with doorways into the wooden gallery that overhung, and through which the a.s.sailants could be kept from approaching too near to the base of the walls. But, after a time, these wooden galleries were found to be inconvenient. Means were taken by the besiegers to set them on fire.

Consequently they were abandoned, and their places were taken by projecting galleries of stone, supported, not on wooden beams, but on stone corbels, and it is this second stage in fortification which is called machicolation.

The battlements were retained, but were no longer roofed over. Consequently it is possible to tell approximately the epoch of a Mediaeval fortification, by a look at the battlements, whether they stand back flush with the walls, and have the beam-holes, or whether they stand forward, bracketed out from the walls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Second stage of battlements.]

Aigues Mortes is a dead town. About a third of the area within the walls is devoted to gardens, or is waste. The population, which in the thirteenth century numbered 15,000 souls, has shrunk to a little over 3,000, a number at which it remains stationary. It does a little sleepy trade in salt, and sees the barges for Beaucaire pa.s.s its walls, and perhaps supplies the boatmen with wine and bread. The neighbourhood is desolate. The soil is so full of salt that it is impatient of tillage, and produces only such herbs as love the sea border. But its lagoons are alive with wild fowl, rose-coloured flamingoes, white gulls, and green metallic-throated ducks.

And now for Maguelonne. I said that Aigues Mortes was a dead town, but Maguelonne was the ghost of one. The best way to reach this latter very singular spot is to take the train from Montpellier to Villeneuve de Maguelonne, and walk thence to the border of the Etang. There one is pretty sure to find fishermen--they catch little else than eels--who will row one across to the narrow strip of land that intervenes between the lagoon and the sea. The littoral chain here is not of sand and gravel only, for a ma.s.s of volcanic tufa rises to the surface, and originally formed an islet in the sea, then, when the process began of forming a littoral belt with a lagoon behind it, the sands clung to this islet and spread out from it to left and right.

On this volcanic islet stood first a Greek and then a Roman city, but of its history nothing is known till the sixth century, when it was attacked from the sea by Wamba, King of the Visigoths. It had been an episcopal city for a century before. After the Visigoths came the Saracens, who gave the place their name, and the harbour of Maguelonne was called Port Sarasin.

In 737, Charles Martel, in order to clear the pirates completely out of their stronghold, destroyed the city to its last foundation, with the sole exception of the old church of S. Peter. The bishop took up his abode on the mainland at Villeneuve, and the seat of the bishopric was moved to Castelnau near Montpellier. For three centuries the islet was abandoned and left a heap of ruins. But it was restored in the eleventh century. The walls were again set up, and flanked with towers, and a causeway consisting of a chain of wooden bridges was carried across the lagoon to Villeneuve.

The entrance to the port was closed lest it should invite Saracen pirates, and another opened under the walls of the town which could be rendered impa.s.sable by a chain at the first sign of danger. The newly-built town speedily showed vigour, became populous, and the harbour was filled with the merchandise of the Mediterranean. Two popes visited the city, Gelasius II. in 1118, and Alexander III. in 1162. In addition to the Cathedral of S. Peter, other churches were raised, dedicated to S. Augustine and S.

Pancras. A castle with keep was erected.